Apple Silicon M1 Chip Smokes Intel Core i9 Processor

Benchmarks for the brand new Apple Silicon M1 Chip are already smoking Intel’s Core i9 processor, and the new M1 Macs haven’t even shipped yet. In July the Mac Dev Kit with a prototype Apple Silicon A12Z, based on the almost 2 year old A12X Bionic, was already shown to beat an Intel i7 – Apple Silicon Mac Dev Kit Native Multi-core Faster Than Intel i7. So I expected the shipping chip to pass even more Intel processors, and it most certainly has, and may beat even more once all the new Mac ship.

Benchmarks from Geekbench

From MacRumors – Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro

The M1 chip, which belongs to a ‌MacBook Air‌ with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433.
…
In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

MacRumors – Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro

This Has Been Coming For A Long Time

From AnandTech – Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 – What to Expect, Based on A14 – goes into a deep dive on Apple Silicon and the history and long road that bought us here.

Apple’s performance trajectory and unquestioned execution over these years is what has made ‌Apple Silicon‌ a reality today. Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph [Intel vs. Apple Top Performance] will realize that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and x86 in favor of their own in-house microarchitecture – staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products.

AnandTech – Apple Announces The Apple Silicon M1: Ditching x86 – What to Expect, Based on A14